The present invention relates to a system and method for displaying e-mail (electronic mail) messages on a device, such as a low bandwidth and/or wireless communication device, and in particular, to such a system and method which enable such messages to be automatically divided into a plurality of smaller portions for transmission and/or display of each portion, as well as such a system and method which enable the e-mail message to be converted in a streamed manner. The system and method of the present invention are particularly useful for transmission and display of e-mail messages by a WAP (wireless application protocol) enabled device.
Cellular telephones are becoming increasingly popular for portable telephone use, particularly for users who are interested in rapid, mobile communication. As the amount of computational power and memory space which are available in such small, portable electronic devices becomes increased, a demand has arisen for different types of communication services through such devices. In particular, users have demanded that cellular telephones receive many different types of multimedia data, including e-mail (electronic mail) messages and Web pages.
In response to such demands, and to extend the power and efficacy of operation of portable, wireless electronic communication devices, the WAP (wireless application protocol) de facto standard has been developed. WAP is now the standard for the presentation and delivery of wireless data, including multimedia and other information, and telephony services, on mobile telephones and other types of wireless communication devices. WAP is designed to efficiently provide both multimedia and telephony services to such wireless communication devices, given the limitations of wireless networks and of the electronic devices themselves.
Wireless communication devices have requirements and drawbacks which are different than cable-linked electronic devices. For example, wireless networks are frequently significantly less stable than cable networks. Since users with such portable communication devices often operate these devices at different locations, the wireless network connection may not always be available, and may even suddenly become unavailable during a single communication session. In addition, the wireless communication devices themselves are more limited in terms of available resources than desktop computers. For example, such wireless communication devices typically have a less powerful CPU (central processing unit), less memory, a lower amount of available power since these devices are often battery-operated, and smaller display screens. Thus, wireless communication devices require adaptations of existing software and data transmission protocols in order to effectively deliver multimedia content from the Internet.
WAP provides the required adaptations and modifications to such software and data transmission protocols in order to meet the requirements of wireless communication devices. For example, HTML (Hyper-text Mark-up Language) has been adapted to form WML (Wireless Mark-up Language), which provides a document mark-up language suitable for WAP-enabled devices and their corresponding limitations. WAP-enabled devices are able to receive and display documents written in WML, thereby enabling such devices to display Web pages which are written in WML, for example.
Unfortunately bandwidth considerations still limit the amount of data which can be rapidly received by WAP-enabled devices, such as cellular telephones for example. This problem is particularly acute with regard to e-mail messages, since the user may wish to only view one e-mail message, such that all of the e-mail messages do not need to be downloaded by the WAP-enabled device. In addition, if the e-mail message is particularly long, the user should not need to wait for the entire single e-mail message to be downloaded by the WAP-enabled device before any part of the e-mail message is converted and decoded.
A more useful solution would enable the user to select individual e-mail messages for viewing. In addition, this solution would also enable the user to begin to view the e-mail message as soon as any part had been converted and decoded for display by the display device. Unfortunately, such a solution is not currently available.
There is thus a need for, and it would be useful to have, a system and a method for transmitting e-mail messages to, and displaying such messages by, a low bandwidth display device, for example to a WAP-enabled device such as a cellular telephone, which enables the user to select a particular e-mail message to be downloaded first, without necessarily downloading the other e-mail messages, and which then prepares the e-mail message for display such that the entire e-mail message does not need to be converted before a first part is displayed by the display device.